Fay Weldon Omnibus: Collected Works of Fay Weldon
Page 78
‘That, darling,’ and she pointed to a swinging sign being carried past by workmen. It read ‘Bellamy House Hotel. Old World Value, New World Comfort’. ‘Whoever thought of that?’
‘I did,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘What is more, darling, I think it’s rather good.’
‘I don’t,’ said Lady Rowena. ‘Old World simply doesn’t recognise the existence of New World. You’ll get the dreadful helicopter set in for a while, but only till they realise Old World isn’t in situ. Then they’ll be off. Just “Bellamy House”, dear, pure and simple.’ Oh, she was smart. Sir Bernard had spent hot nights with Lady Rowena, her long legs, still booted (for he rather liked that) wrapped round his strong neck (or he rather thought that was what was happening), or else lying more sedately, her plummy voice in his ear (she never whispered: the whole world could hear her bizarre suggestions. What did she care? Servants didn’t count as other people anyhow, she’d told him so), so he thought it behoved him to call her darling. And Driver would nudge him by day and say, ‘A bit of hot stuff I found you there. I told you the brave deserved the fair. And she’s got so many contacts, that woman. The right lay is the best entrée!’
And because Driver’s advice always seemed to work out, Sir Bernard listened, and slept with Lady Rowena, and dreamt of Carmen.
A catechism
Q: This is all very well, but what does the Devil do with souls once he’s got them?
A: Pretty much what the tractors were doing that day at Sealord Mansion. That is to say, making one undifferentiated mass of a whole lot of originally rather nice if trivial things. Like an angry child churning up all his dinner on the plate before he eats it. The Devil seeks sameness. It’s the Devil’s plan to create a faceless, tractable, self-interested crowd out of the human race; a crowd whose behaviour is predictable, and therefore controllable. Self-interest is supremely predictable. It’s the same for everyone everywhere, as morality is not.
Q: Can you hold out against the Devil?
A: Yes. You can trick him by word, and surprise him by deed, because the only thing he really understands is self-interest. He lacks imagination. So his deals often don’t hold. They fail, like a Moscow coup.
Q: What sort of deal has Driver made with Sir Bernard?
A: In return for surrendering his soul to the Devil and not to God when he dies, so that the Devil gets a nice rich extra goblet for the mashing (or another ally in the war of Evil against Good, depending on which tradition you favour), Sir Bernard gets his wishes granted, his desires fulfilled, though this could sometimes be a problem for Driver. How can Driver square Sir Bernard’s wish to have Carmen for a wife with his desire for social status? It’s a problem. Driver, on the day the three girls went for their interview at Bellamy House, had been hoping that Sir Bernard would forget Carmen and fall in love with Lady Rowena and make life simpler all round. Carmen was meant to have gone after the air hostess job. But she didn’t, so that was that. The Devil’s only weapon against free will is self-interest. Now he just has to stand back and see what happens.
Q: How do I know when the Devil has got his eye on me?
A: You will hear a little voice in your ear saying, ‘I have to look after myself; no one else will.’
Q: Then what do I do?
A: You think of your mother and try not to believe it.
Q: Does the Devil have rules he has to keep to?
A: Oddly enough, he has a sense of fair play. He doesn’t move the goal posts.
Q: What is his hold over Sir Bernard?
A: Sir Bernard once said, while the Devil was passing, ‘I’d give my very soul for enough capital, just for once,’ and the Devil heard and now Sir Bernard goes from strength to strength and Driver is his chauffeur, his amanuensis, his Grey Eminence, the private whisperer in his ear, and those who knew him before and know him now marvel, so changed a man is he. The clumsy oaf, chicken farmer, drumstick maker, now a friend to celebrities, patron of popular causes, a man who leaps out of bed in the morning to do his press-ups. Who ever has enough capital? You can go on needing more, more, for ever. Driver’s going to be around for a long time.
Many people, of course, put the improvement down to Sir Bernard’s former nasty wife’s being so unfaithful he at last found the courage to divorce her, but I know it’s more than that. Fat had turned to muscle, meanness into lordliness, twenty years been taken from his life clock just like that. Mind you, Sir Bernard still had no taste. The Devil can give a man everything but taste. He has none himself, or very little. God is his brother. You know how it is in families: how the qualities are doled out by common consent. God was the one with taste; the serious one with an eye for a painting, an ear for a symphony; the Devil the one who knew how to have a good time, and who listened to Radio One, down-market to his leather boots.
Q: How do you know all this about the Devil? Stop, stop, or I’ll call the vicar.
A: I am the vicar.
7
At ten to three Carmen, Laura and Annie tried to effect an entry through the barred steel gates of Bellamy House, now in place, only to find they couldn’t be opened manually. The workmen had gone off to watch Sir Bernard’s arrival; the girls rattled and shook and shouted, but to no avail.
And then the BMW, Driver at the wheel, came up beside them.
‘What’s the trouble?’ Driver asked.
‘We can’t get in. First we were early, now we’ll be late.’
‘The mechanism’s metal activated,’ said Driver. ‘Hop in and I’ll get you through.’
And they did. The interior of the car was dark, warm and cosy: the leather seats soft and crinkly; the vehicle was far more spacious on the inside than the outside would allow you to believe – a car designer’s dream come true. Carmen sat in the front: Annie and Laura in the back. Their thin white limbs glowed pinkly perfect: they could admire themselves.
Driver punched a button: the gates parted: the BMW slid through.
‘So how was the gift of beauty?’ he asked.
‘It was a real drag,’ Carmen replied.
‘I simply don’t understand,’ said Driver, ‘why any young woman whose avowed ambition is to get out of here would rather be a domestic than an air hostess.’
‘I want to be with my friends,’ said Carmen.
Driver swivelled his head to look at Laura and Annie in the back.
‘Friends,’ said Driver, ‘can be an Achilles heel. And you have two of them. Ouch! Ouch!’ He could steer the car perfectly well with his eyes altogether off the road, and his hands off the wheel as well. The drive was lined with gracious oaks. A host of pollarders swarmed up them to remove as many lower branches as they could without actually killing the trees, which were protected by a court order so powerful not even Sir Bernard could gainsay it. They carried saws and rope; they scuttled, halfway between man and monkey, or Demon and Pict. Take your pick.
Driver said to Annie, ‘I know your mother well, and her good friend the Count. I’m almost part of the family. I expect I’ll be seeing quite a lot of you, so long as you stick close to Carmen.’
Then Driver said to Laura, ‘Nice little baby you’ve got in there. I’ll give him a silver christening spoon, when the time comes. Any friend of Carmen is a friend of mine.’
And then he turned his blue eyes back to Carmen. Oh, he was handsome! ‘You weren’t so wrong about your mother,’ Driver said to her then, ‘only it was the black knight not the white. As for you, if you don’t do as I suggest, it will be the worse for you Chickedy-chick!’
And as the car doors opened to let them out Carmen felt a sharp sting on the side of her neck: she slapped the spot with her hand.
‘A bee sting, I expect,’ said Driver. ‘A queen bee. Better get in the house quick before the whole swarm arrives.’ And off he drove.
‘What was he going on about?’ asked Annie.
‘You do know some weirdos, Carmen,’ complained Laura.
‘Queen bees don’t sting,’ said Carmen, ‘so sucks to him.’
As Sir Bernard and Lady Rowena climbed the steps to the big front door, its iron hinges now replaced by repro-Gothic steel, the dents in the wide steps made by the feet of the past first smoothed them marble-veneered, Carmen, Annie and Laura followed up behind. The door was opened – smoothly and easily, with an electrical device which was the interior designer’s equivalent to power steering – by Mrs Haverill, a woman of indeterminate age, but of very determined temperament. She was a reincarnation, or so it seemed to the girls, of Daphne du Maurier’s Mrs Danvers in the novel Rebecca, which Mrs Baker had last year obliged the class to read. Her pupils had of course hired a video of the film and made do with that, but never mind.
‘Welcome, Sir Bernard,’ Mrs Haverill said, ‘welcome, Lady Rowena,’ and she took one look at the girls and shut the door in their faces.
Once inside, Lady Rowena strode around the great hall, which for the sake of dignity and grandeur had been timbered and raftered in the Gothic style, and its rotunda squared off to facilitate the conversion of wasted space to more guest bedrooms.
‘Not my taste, darling,’ she said. ‘In fact it’s a monstrosity, but good taste never earned anyone a penny.’ And she laughed; her laugh was always rather like a horse’s neigh. She was one of a pair of partners who ran a firm of interior designers in Sloane Square, London. Her usual stamping ground was Chelsea and Kensington. She thought here was the back of beyond and she was right.
She ran to the top of the stairs and down again – Sir Bernard could only admire her stamina: she was well exercised; even he, from hours in the gym a week, couldn’t match it.
‘Why isn’t the carpet on the top floor laid?’ she demanded of Mrs Haverill. Sir Bernard marvelled. Of all the people he knew in the world, Mrs Haverill was the one who most scared him. She was a good friend of his chauffeur’s: if it hadn’t been an absurd notion he would have thought he and she were having it off.
Q: But doesn’t Sir Bernard know Driver is Mephistopheles? Surely he’s aware he’s mortgaged his soul in advance of his death?
A: He does and he doesn’t. In the same way as you can dream you got up and found a front tooth missing, and went to work, and it seemed perfectly real, if distressing, at the time, until the alarm goes and you wake up and have to do the same thing all over again, but at least you have the tooth. If you have someone like Driver (or, come to that, my carer Alison) around, reality and dream are easily confused. Was that real, or was that dream? Was that in a book I read, or did it happen? Okay? Can we continue?
‘We’re opening within days, too!’ said Lady Rowena to Mrs Haverill. ‘I am accustomed to being let down, but seldom to this extent.’
Mrs Haverill’s eyes snapped, in the same way Driver’s could if you crossed him.
‘The instructions issuing from your office,’ said Mrs Haverill, ‘were both confused and confusing, and perhaps Sir Bernard needs to be advised of that.’
‘Now, now,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘No quarrelling in the ranks,’ and if Lady Rowena hadn’t wanted so badly to become Lady Bellamy that would have been that, but Ann & Rowena Interior Design was in some difficulty: orders had been falling off. A scandal had connected Lady Rowena to royalty in a rather unfortunate way – and though scandal amongst the titled is normally good for business, if it concerns royalty ranks quickly close. Lady Rowena needed Sir Bernard’s robust good name, his reputation for straight talking and honest thinking, to see her through the next few years. She’d just have to put up with a quick dive down through layers of social strata. Anything she could get.
The front door bell rang: ding dong. A real bell, from an ocean liner, at the reception desk had been activated by an electric bell, set in the midst of a plaster rose on the front door. The sound echoed, as it would in a fog at sea: it startled everyone. A poor, lost, lonely bat, determined not to be driven out of its home, rose from a cornice and circled in its much-diminished habitat and sank again. It had no way out any more.
‘I suppose that bloody thing’s protected,’ said Lady Rowena. ‘No wonder this country is going to wrack and ruin. The wrong people are in control. I suppose we could turn bats into some kind of Olde-Worlde feature. Olde-Worlde Bats in the New Worlde Order.’ You could tell she was in a bad temper. She rearranged her face and nuzzled Sir Bernard’s strong neck. ‘Darling,’ she said.
‘Darling,’ he said.
Mrs Haverill opened the door to Carmen, Laura and Annie.
‘We’ve come about the job,’ said Carmen.
‘Jobs,’ said Laura.
‘You have no business coming to the front,’ said Mrs Haverill. ‘Go round to the servants’ entrance.’ Lady Rowena had had the ‘Staff Entrance – This Way’ sign changed to ‘Servants’ Entrance’ and an arrow. She liked changing signs. Her arrangement with Driver was on a purely reciprocal basis: you do me a favour, I do you one. It did not involve the selling of her soul: could not, for she never had one to begin with. Her mother had obviously noticed it when she was born, handing her over instantly to nannies for rearing. Who is ever to say what is cause, what is effect?
Carmen said to Mrs Haverill, ‘I’m not going all the way round to the back now I’m here. That’s silly,’ and put her foot in the door, although Annie and Laura tried to stop her. Mrs Haverill activated the mechanism which closed it from the desk but on meeting the resistance of Carmen’s foot it bounced away again. Carmen, for her part, pressed the centre of the plaster rose again and heard the bell inside begin to toll. She pressed and pressed and pressed.
‘Let’s just go,’ said Annie.
‘I don’t believe this is happening,’ said Laura.
Mrs Haverill spoke to Sir Bernard above the ding-donging of the bell.
‘You see the material I have to work with?’ she demanded. ‘The quality of staff here in the back of beyond? What with that and other things it is amazing there is any carpet down at all.’
‘Let them in,’ said Sir Bernard flatly, and opened the door himself since Mrs Haverill’s colour rose alarmingly.
Carmen stepped inside and said, ‘I think that was entirely out of order. This is the New World and people are more equal than you’d believe. I am not going to walk half a mile round to the back of a building so you lot can feel better than me.’
Sir Bernard stared at Carmen in admiration while Mrs Haverill said, ‘I’m sorry, but you don’t have the right attitude for anyone starting work in the hotel industry; you are wasting your time and mine, the lot of you,’ and Lady Rowena said, ‘Call the police, or are you just going to let that little tart get away with it?’ and Carmen said, ‘You’re all out of turn. We’re here by appointment,’ to which Lady Rowena responded, ‘Good God, school leavers. The whole country’s swarming with them.’
‘My, my,’ said Sir Bernard (a phrase Driver had recently suggested as a mild alternative for ‘Fuck me’ or ‘Jesus wept’), ‘there’s a lass with a mind of her own. Take her on, Mrs Haverill. Take on all three of them. This is the new young blood this country needs.’
‘You’re out of your mind,’ said Lady Rowena. ‘Darling, she’s not new, she’s as old as the hills.’
Sir Bernard looked again but did not recognise the girl of his dreams. He’d broken his glasses and Driver had taken them in for mending. Now in the days when I had the use of my legs one or two men looked at me like that: that is what unrequited love is all about. You are obviously the girl of their dreams, just as they are the boy of your dreams, it’s just they don’t remember their dreams and you do. It’s a tragedy: so much potential happiness so often wasted by sheer forgetfulness.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ said Carmen. ‘I wouldn’t work here if you paid me,’ but they all knew what she meant. Later, of course, Carmen was to receive the gift of tongues, at
least sporadically. ‘But if you guys want to, that’s up to you.’ And she stalked out. She liked to make an exit. Laura and Annie stayed.
Carmen went and sat upon the step and stared moodily into the wreckage all around. The helicopter pilot revved his engines for some reason and sent a dust storm flurrying off towards her, but she took no notice of that.
‘Carmen,’ said Driver, whose car had approached unseen through the dust, ‘by the way. A word of warning to your friend – the pretty one. She’d better be quick getting rid of the baby. There’s a soul hanging around, looking for a place. I smelt it as I got out of the car.’
‘What does a soul smell like?’ asked Carmen, interested through her displeasure.
‘Colourless, odourless, tasteless,’ said Driver, ‘but you do get a whiff of the ozone that goes with them. Pity to see a pretty girl like that mess up her life, don’t you think? If she has one child now it’ll be three before she’s twenty. She’s the type. That’s another freebie; a piece of advice from someone who knows what he’s talking about. When it comes to termination, do it soon, do it now.’
‘Bugger off,’ said Carmen, I’m sorry to say, and then rather wished she hadn’t, for he stopped sniffing and snarled instead, baring perfect teeth, rather too small to be altogether manly. The helicopter tried his rotors again and this time Carmen breathed in dust and spluttered, and when she recovered he’d gone.
Mrs Haverill led Laura and Annie along the upstairs corridors, opening doors to show immaculate bedrooms with an agreeable chintzy, frilly, olde-English air: high mattresses, plump sofas and lavender soap in the blue bathrooms, along with every gift the travelling heart could desire, from plastic shoe horns to presentation folding toothbrushes. Mrs Haverill explained that the rooms were all called after famous English composers, writers, poets, painters and so forth. Sir Bernard was a great patron of the Arts. The Hotel could engage the girls on a casual, part-time basis, no paid holidays or superannuation, for an initial period of sixty days at seventy-five pence the hour. The hours were six in the morning to midday, then two-thirty to seven-thirty at night, with overtime as required at time and a quarter. If the probation period was satisfactory, wages would rise to ninety pence the hour plus productivity bonus and two-week annual holiday, and every second weekend off; hours from midday to eleven pm, overtime at time and a third as required. Meals were free.